


In which Shepard

by infiltraitorN7



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, Beam Run, F/M, ME3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-09
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-08-14 02:16:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7995004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infiltraitorN7/pseuds/infiltraitorN7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of short works about Eris "Renegade Shit, Defender of the Galaxy, Will Punch Anyone, Anytime, She'll Punch Her Own Face" Shepard</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In which Shepard thinks about time

“If you could have any superpower, what would it be?” she had asked, in one of those moments suspended between terror and boredom. Maybe the word for those moments was  _calm_ , but after life under her, with her, next to her— he couldn’t remember what  _calm_ was supposed to mean anymore.

Between the blood, and fire, the smoke and shattering glass, the popping of thermal clips, cherry blossom petals falling in the Presidium— one day she had asked, out of the silence.

“I dunno,” he said.

“C’mon,” she insisted.

“Being able to shred your nervous system with my mind isn’t super enough for you?” he asked, pulling a length of hair away from her face, tugging gently.

* * *

 

“Not fair,”she said. “You gotta choose a superpower that doesn’t exist, Superman.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Maybe flying? I always had dreams about flying when I was a kid. Nothing epic— just that feeling of weightlessness, skimming over picket fences— like swimming in the air, you know?”

“I never had dreams like that. I was always falling in my dreams, not flying,” she said softly.

Before he could respond, she pressed her palm over his heart, fingers spread. “And we already fly, every day. Out in the stars. You’re really bad at this, you know?”

He laughed, a sound that could have been a hitch in his breath, or a sigh, as much as a laugh. He slid his own palm over the back of her hand. Seams of red split the skin of her knuckles, scars glowing faintly in the dark. They looked painful, in those last days.

“Yeah, I’m pretty bad at this,” he agreed. “So what superpower would  _you_  have?”

She was quiet for a long time, and the quiet was comfortable. He sank into it, closed his eyes. She’d say it when she was ready: he had learned this much by now, though he still didn’t know so much, and never would. But he  _did_  know this much: she didn’t do small talk, or sweet nothings.

“I’d be able to stop time, for everyone but me,” she said. 

“Only stop it? Not, say, control it? Be able to go back in time too?”

“Hey, I’m not  _that_ greedy. I can live with a limited superpower. Because I’m pretty awesome already. It wouldn’t be fair to everyone else.”

“Uh huh. Right.” He shakes his head, mouth twisted in one of his half smiles.

“It would be a tricky superpower, because you couldn’t go back in time and fix things. It would only work for future things, and you’d have to be able to tell, to choose the right moment to stop it flowing. Gotta be skilled,” she said, half joking, half serious.

He lifted an eyebrow. “What would you do with it? You know, besides using it to booby trap the councilors’ offices without anyone being able to prove a thing.”

“Or to recalibrate the Thanix while Garrus is standing right there,” she snickered, trying to imagine his face when time flowed again, and he saw the numbers.

“Or to reprogram Glyph to respond to Liara’s questions in iambic pentameter, and _only_ iambic pentameter,” he suggested.

“To delete  _all_ of Joker’s porn before EDI noticed and alerted him.”

They dissolved for awhile, into stupid laughter, stupid jokes turned hilarious because of the sheer gratefulness both felt that so many of their friends were still around, that it wasn’t the end quite yet.

He closed his eyes again, pressed his lips to the top of her head.

“To arm the bomb, and carry Ash back to the Normandy,” she whispered, after awhile.

“To find a cure for Kepral’s Syndrome,” he responds.

“To get Mordin out of the tower, before it blew.”

As with all the laughter in their lives during those final days, it was fleeting. Precious in its scarcity.

“I’m not asking to undo what had already happened,” she said. “Just, all the things that happened, where more time would have made the difference. Just to have had enough time to prevent it from happening at all. That’s not asking for so much, is it?”

“No,” he said. “I think that’s a good superpower.”

***

It’s the end, now.

The world is on fire.

The sky is falling, reapers like meteors falling like rain—

The nightmare forms of former people staggering through that strange twilight, moaning in the ash—

The world will end in grey and searing red.

Her skin is grey, and her scars are red.

She watches it happen: the city is collapsing around them, as the reapers’ beams rain hell on them all. As the dust clears, she sees him lying in the rubble, and she drags herself forward.

She tells herself that if there was ever a time for any of the bullshit she has ever spouted to be true, it had better be now.

It’s not enough, to shoot the shit, to wonder idly about super powers. She’s gotta be Superman now. She imagines it, in this moment, as the only sound she can hear is the ringing in her ears, a deafening siren. She wonders if she’ll ever hear again. She doesn’t care.

In her mind, she stops time. Reapers hang, multi-jointed legs taut and spread, revealing single red eyes gleaming in the gloom; only she moves, as the world stops around her, in her mind’s eye.

She is limping, and her right leg is already dragging, but she has all the time in the world. She _knows_ this. She has made it so. She breathes. She moves. She reaches him, her teeth clenched, deaf in the darkness, sees her own gloved hand reach out, pull on his shoulder. She rolls him over, and his nose is bloody, blood almost black in the twilight. She wants to lean down, listen for his breathing, but she can’t fucking hear. She remembers now, why it matters if she never hears again— she’ll never hear his voice, soft in the morning, as he asks if she wants coffee; she’ll never hear the hitch in his breath when a new thought comes to him, when a new idea flares in that ever-churning brain of his; she’ll never hear him laugh again, that low chuckle, smothered mirth— _fuck_ _fuck fuck_  she hopes she hasn’t gone totally deaf.

She can’t listen for his breath, so she rips off her glove, places her fingers against his neck, slick with blood, so it takes a few second to find the right spot as she searches for a pulse.

He is alive.

She stands, and she hauls him up with her. His head lolls, and she places her bare palm on the side of his face and pulls his head to her shoulder and holds it there, as she drags them both through the murk.

Time is still stopped. No husks approach them. No brutes charging from the endless rubble. It is just the two of them, as she drags him in the opposite direction of the beam. She is looking for Garrus. She knows he survived; he has survived too much, they have survived too much together, for that hard bastard to go down at this, their final hour. She knows he’s alive. And she’s going to find him. And she’s going to put both of them on a fucking shuttle, and she’s going to turn around, and she’s going to end this, once and for all. Because she’s tired. She’s so tired, and she doesn’t think she can do this for much longer.

It seems like forever, but she knows it’s not, because she has stopped time, she is keeping the world at bay with sheer force of will, but finally, finally, she sees a solid figure in the dust, and there he is. She knows that she can trust Garrus to do what needs to be done. That it’s okay to let time flow again, and get this over with.

She lets time move again.

Garrus hobbles, mouth open as if he’s yelling something. She can barely hear him, but she is thrilled to know that she hasn’t lost it all. Her tinnitus will probably be much worse than it even was before; she’ll probably need a hearing aid, or have to bribe Miranda to implant new eardrums. She screams into the space between them, and he turns.

She has carried Alenko through the smoke, and dragged him into Garrus’s sheltering arms—

She grasps the Turian’s hand and he squeezes so hard she is sure her bones are broken.

“They’re coming back for us.”

“Good.”

“But Shepard—”

“Garrus. You gotta sit this one out, buddy. Please. Make sure—”

“All right. I know. I’ll take care of him.”

As he is making his promise, Kaidan lifts his head, and the relief that floods through her body is euphoric, like snorting the finest dust she has ever gotten her hands on. She feels like she could punch a Reaper.

Garrus begins to walk him away, as the rescue vessel roars behind them, but Kaidan is reaching out, the look on his face—

And the look on Kaidan’s face, when he realizes she is going ahead, and leaving him behind, like she has always done—that look on his face breaks something other than bones, somewhere beneath all the reknit tissue, the strange skeleton under her skin.

“Don’t leave me behind,” he pleads.

She grips his bloody cheek with her shaking fingers and she says:

“You better be watching. I’m gonna stop time. My turn to be Superman. I already did it once, but you were passed out so you didn’t see it. You always were stubborn.”

He chokes on a laugh. Although the look on his face is still killing her, she’s so grateful, so desperately grateful that she gets to hear it one more time— the sound of his voice, surprised in joy.

“Don’t look away this time, you might miss it again,” she says, and she hopes he can hear what she’s not saying.

_“No matter what happens, know that I love you. Always.”_

She knows it’s cruel, to ask that of him. But she has always been a little cruel. She knows it’s cruel because she knows what he’s gonna see. She knows how this ends. She has always known. But it isn’t anything he hasn’t seen before. It isn’t anything he hasn’t survived before. He’s stronger than she has ever been, and she needs to know that his eyes will be on her at the end, that this person who saw so much value in her strange, flawed life, will bear witness to the last choice she ever makes. She needs to know that he will see that she did good. That in the end, she  _was_  good.

And then the shuttle is lifting, and she is alone. She thinks her hand is broken, and there is an ocean of rubble ahead of her, and a lifetime of choices falling away behind her, and time is running out.


	2. In which Shepard has chosen Control

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My take on a choice that my Shep didn't make

She’s not quite who she was, now.

She is herself— all of her lived experiences, every memory still stitched in the stretched fabric of her self—

But she is herself spread across space and time—

The stitches pull, but don’t break.

Her limbs no longer work as they once did. The finesse of human fingers is a luxury from the past, a half-forgotten thing. She is heavy, and slow, immense strength replaces nimble speed. But there are other things to worry about, now. Rebuilding— the scale of it would have overwhelmed her, before. But now she sees with many different eyes, and all of her selves take up more space than she could have imagined, before, when she was seeing through only two bloodshot eyes, glowing red in the dark.

Usually, she doesn’t miss her pounding heart, or her fragile wrists; she doesn’t miss breath, or pain.

She does not speak, in her new forms. She has many voices, now, but uses none. She communicates instructions and queries through the synthetics, zeroes and ones through encrypted transmissions, relayed faithfully to the organics through Geth platforms, through AIs, through data analysts. In the beginning, it is because she does not trust her new voices not to betray her, to break as she drifts over Vancouver, or Tuchanka, or Palaven. In time, her words become half-remembered things, like her rough hands, or her body pressed against another’s.

Her many-limbed selves lift weight that costs her nothing, now. She can destroy entire cities with a shuttering eye. Or blast rubble into dust, for future fields, rows upon rows of swaying leaves. For new buildings, cities upon cities rising into the skies.

She never sleeps. She is almost pure purpose, now. She doesn’t miss the nightmares’ whispers, or the sweating fear.

At first, she does not measure time. Peace dulls the edges of a ticking clock; she has all the time in the universe now. _They are safe_. She has time to drift. Time to watch stars flare out; to watch comets trailing through the black; silent storms over planets her feet have never touched. She half forgets that others don’t have the same luxury.

She half forgets, until her eyes over Vancouver watch salt and pepper hair turn completely white. As her eyes over Rannoch watch once-nimble fingers slow through arthritic pain. As old, stubborn pilots finally cede their seats to younger bodies with younger reflexes.

There is one day, out of all the days stretching before and behind her, that she misses the finesse of her fingers. That her former body weighs more heavily than all of her new ones combined.

When they put him in the ground, as she drifts over orderly rows of stones stretching to the horizon. As they fold the flag and hand it to the one who came after her.

If she had hands, she would knock on the door, and ask for the dog tags. She would cradle them in calloused palms. If she had a neck, she would slip them over her bent head and feel the chain bite into her tender skin. If she had tears, she would shed them, alone and in the dark, as she held the metal, fisted to her mouth, as she rocked herself in the silence his loss left to deafen ears she no longer has.

But she has no hands. No tender neck. No soft skin or hot tears to shed.

Galactic citizens turn and look up, dimly anxious, as the usually silent Reapers begin to hum in the sky. Jets are scrambled, just in case. Galactic leaders listen to reconnaissance reports with furrowed brows: no change in behavior, no sign of aggression, or a return to the dark old days before the Battle of London. Just, a low vibration, emanating from every Reaper in the galaxy.

It lasts for a few days, and then fades.

Frayed stitches snap, after long years of use.

She’s not who she was, now.


	3. In which Shepard has her hair done

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ash and Shepard share a secret, written for the @meflashfanwork theme of “secrets” on Tumblr

 

She had never explained, why she wore her hair so long. When it got everywhere. When it tangled in her rifle. When it got stuck in her armor, and she’d have to yank her head, so that a clump was left behind, and she rubbed her head gingerly from where it had pulled. And above all, when it seemed she had no idea how to style it so that it wouldn’t fall out of the messy ball she always tried to contain it in.

No one asked her, in the beginning. When she first stepped aboard the Normandy, there were bruises under her bloodshot eyes. She gave terse responses to legitimate questions, and didn’t bother answering stupid ones. No one dared ask her about her tangled hair, about bobby pins that fell out when she shook her head before muttering _I don’t have time for this._

“Why doesn’t she just cut it?” Pressly asked Williams, as they watched her brush strands from her casuals in annoyance, as Shepard leaned over Joker’s seat in the cockpit.

“Commander, you’re worse than a dog, shedding all over my pristine control panel,” Joker complained, waving his hands in front of his face, as if to rid himself of a circling fly.

“Good question,” Ash replied, before heading down to the cargo bay.

“Never had a dog,” Shepard answered, stepping away from the pilot’s seat.

“That explains a lot,” Joker grumbled.

“Oh yeah?” Shepard asked.

“Yeah.”

She stood considering him for a moment, before turning on her heel and heading back to whatever part of the ship she hid in while off duty, even after she was given control of the Normandy. She felt like the captain’s cabin was still Anderson’s, and avoided using it as much as possible.

“I’m surprised the Alliance lets her wear it like that, when it’s clearly a safety hazard,” Garrus said to Kaidan one day, as they watched her picking a hair out of her soup in the mess.

“I’ve had the same thought myself,” Kaidan said.

“It’s not like your hair is exactly the standard Alliance high and tight, LT,” Ash pointed a spoon at him accusingly. “Pot, meet kettle.”

“Hey, I’m not complaining!” Kaidan held up his hands, eyes flicking to the commander, hoping she was too occupied with her soup to listen in on their conversation. She ate like an animal: fast and messy. Stuffing her cheeks with bread, burning her tongue instead of waiting for the food to cool. As if she were afraid she wouldn’t get enough, that someone would take it from her first. Or that there wouldn’t be more when she was finished. “Can’t complain about something that pretty,” he added.

Ash whistled softly, as Garrus’s mandibles twitched. Kaidan shook his head.

“Pretty, huh,” Wrex said. “Give her a big hump and then we’ll talk pretty.”

“Oh I don’t know, Wrex. I can see how her waist is… supportive, and pretty,” Garrus said, tilting his head to see the waist in question, half-covered by the table.

Kaidan looked sharply at the turian.

“Better watch your six, Alenko,” Ash laughed. “You’ve got competition. You should tell her that her hair is pretty before Garrus steals your thunder by complimenting her supportive waist.”

It was Garrus’s turn to hold up his hands, “You know what? Forget I said anything.” He coughed, as Tali brought her own tray over to the table and sat next to him.

“What are we discussing?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Kaidan and Garrus said.

“… I see,” she said, sticking a straw into her own dextrose-based soup.

“Is Liara not eating tonight?” Ash asked, looking around the mess.

“She said she wasn’t feeling well,” Kaidan said. “I’ll bring her some soup later, if she doesn’t come in.”

“Have you seen the latest episode of _Primarch and Pilgrimage_ , Garrus?” Tali asked, over the sounds of spoons clinking in bowls, and the hum of the Normandy.

His mandibles twitched again. “No, not yet. I got caught up trying to fine-tune my Viper’s scope last night, I’m _this_ close to maximizing its accuracy—”

“Oh! You have to watch it, Sumi-Veenan _just_ deleted the Primarch’s message meant for Kema-Yenar, so Kema doesn’t know that he had amnesia this whole—”

“Don’t tell me!” Garrus cried, dropping his spoon. “Spoilers!”

“Oh, I am sorry! So sorry! I am just so excited, you will love it! The angst in this episode is magnificent!”

“What is _Primarch and Pilgrimage_?” Ash asked.

“You haven’t heard of it? It’s an amazing drama about the forbidden love between a lowly quarian on pilgrimage to Palaven, and the Primarch whose heart she captures,” Tali said, wiggling in her chair.

“You into that sort of thing, Vakarian?” Ash lifted an eyebrow, as everyone’s head swiveled to stare at him.

“I have been known to— indulge in that type of entertainment, from time to time,” he murmured, rubbing the back of his neck. “I have always appreciated a good… ‘Cinderella story,’ I think you humans call it.”

“Even I’ve seen _Primarch and Pilgrimage_ ,” Kaidan interrupted. “It’s not bad.”

“Well it doesn’t surprise me that _you_ watch it,” Ash said. Kaidan’s mouth turned down at one corner, and he looked like he was about to reply when a terrible coughing noise came from the other side of the mess.

All heads turned again, as Commander Shepard sat hacking in the corner, hand in her mouth, and every expression, human and alien alike, turned to disgust as she pulled a long hair out of her throat.

Every expression, save one. “Now _that’s_ what I call pretty,” Wrex said. “Just get it out Shepard. Better out than in, that’s what my people say,” he called across the room.

Shepard stared down at the table now spattered with soup, hair falling like a curtain over her shoulder.

Kaidan was launching himself from his seat as Ash said, “Good God, Commander, are you all right?”

Before anyone else had moved, Kaidan had reached Shepard and was already gently pulling her hair back from the mess her soup had made of her casuals as she held a hand to her chest and breathed.

Tali put a hand on Garrus’s arm and pointed, wiggling in her seat. “He’s just like Primarch Priapus when Kema was poisoned by her conniving step-sister!” she whisper-squealed.

“Spoilers!” Garrus pleaded, putting his hands to his forehead.

“I would offer to get Dr. Chakwas, but I think LT has you covered, Ma’am,” Ash said, leaning back and smiling.

Shepard didn’t seem to hear, as she looked up into Kaidan’s face, eyes watering, and he froze, still holding her hair, with an expression of dawning horror, eyes widened under his thick brows.

“I— uh, didn’t want your hair to get dirty,” Kaidan finally said, still frozen. “I mean, I didn’t want you to choke on any more of it, and also not for it to, to get dirty, with the soup—” he continued, as if unable to stop his mouth from moving, but with each word his face seemed to beg for someone to stop him.

“It’s all right, Alenko,” Shepard managed to rasp, not taking her eyes off his face. “Thanks.”

His fist flexed in her hair.

“You’re welcome,” he said softly, and then let go.

“All right, this is ridiculous. Commander, can I formally request that you come with me?” Ash said, standing up.

Shepard kept looking at Kaidan, but said, “Yes.”

Ash strode over to where Shepard was sitting, pulled her firmly but gently from her chair, and scooted her to the door with little pushes until the Commander slapped her hands away and finally walked briskly out of the mess.

“I’m no judge of human mating rituals, Lieutenant, but that looked pretty smooth to me,” Garrus broke the resounding silence left after their commander’s departure.

“I have seen human soap operas,” Tali said. “That really was romantic.”

“Now my soup is colder than a Tuchankan nuclear winter,” Wrex complained, before downing the entire bowl, the way Shepard took shots.

Kaidan stood, still rooted to the spot. He flexed his hand again, before turning and leaving as well.

***

“Commander, I may be out of bounds here, but do you even know how to braid hair?” Ash asked, sitting on a bunk, as Shepard leaned with her back against the scuffed metal wall in the crew’s quarters.

Shepard was silent for a moment, before sighing.

“No.”

“Okay. I’m not even going to ask about why you insist on keeping your hair this length, but let me at least braid it for you, and maybe teach you a thing or two in the process.” She tapped her foot on the floor in front of her.

Shepard just stared at her.

“Seriously, Ma’am. Come sit.”

Finally, she moved away from the wall and approached Ash. She sat, both legs folded underneath herself, fists resting on her thighs, back as straight as the sticks most turians had up their asses.

“Permission to braid your hair, Commander?” Ash asked.

Shepard paused for a long moment.

“I won’t hurt you, I promise. I’m very good with hair. I have three sisters, and I was in charge of braiding hair when we were running late in the mornings before school, when they were too little to do it themselves,” she said gently.

“Permission granted,” Shepard said.

Ash sat on the bunk and examined the disaster that was Shepard’s hair, although it was mostly soup-free, thanks to Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko’s valiant efforts.

“All right. First I’m going to run out some of these knots with my fingers, okay? Tell me if I pull too hard.”

Shepard nodded.

As she worked in silence, she noticed that the longer she ran her hands through her commander’s hair, the more relaxed Shepard’s spine became, until she had almost melted back against the bunk between Ash’s legs. Ash smiled, unseen behind her commander’s head.

“Nothing quite like having someone else play with your hair, huh?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Shepard said, and shivered.

“Now I’m going to give you a simple French braid, okay?” She rested her hands on Shepard’s shoulders, waiting for her to nod approval.

“I looked up how to braid hair,” Shepard said suddenly. “On the Extranet. I watched vids and everything. Still couldn’t manage to do it myself. No patience.”

“Nobody ever taught you?” Ash asked, and felt Shepard’s shoulders tense under her hands, and then relax again.

“Nah. Parents were too busy keeping the farm running. Dad always cut my hair short. The heat index where we lived could be pretty brutal. So it was a health thing, as well as an efficiency thing.”

“I’ll show you how to do a simple braid, once I’m done with the French part,” Ash said. Shepard nodded again.

She worked in silence again, gently tugging Shepard’s hair, smoothing, checking for symmetry, and Shepard became so relaxed that her head would bob with every tug Ash gave her hair.

“Okay I know I said I wouldn’t ask, but I’m going to ask anyway. Why do you keep it so long, if you don’t really know how to work with it?” she said.

Shepard straightened again.

“Seems like it gets in your way an awful lot, Commander,” Ash prompted, when Shepard didn’t answer.

“Do I have your word you won’t repeat what I say, Gunnery Chief Williams?”

“Aye, aye Ma’am. You have my word, as an Alliance marine and a Williams.”

“I think it’s pretty,” Shepard finally admitted.

“It _is_ pretty. And I’m not the only one who thinks so,” Ash said.

Shepard sat up even straighter.

“Wanna know who?”

“Wouldn’t want you to betray any confidences, Williams,” Shepard finally answered, though it sounded painful for her to say so.

“Roger that, Commander. I won’t rat him out,” Ash said, suppressing a laugh.

“I hope you keep my secret better than you just kept his,” Shepard growled.

“As if he’s even bothering to keep it a secret, Commander. Okay, now that I’m done with your scalp, let’s talk a simple braid,” she continued, as Shepard nodded gingerly, leaning into Ash’s hands, the warmth of her instruction, and the feeling of friendship that was starting to make her chest ache.

***

Later, when most of the Normandy’s combat squad were already asleep, Ash found Kaidan sitting with Liara in the deserted mess, each holding mugs, the steam drifting in the dimmed light.

“You missed an epic dinner, Dr. T’Soni,” Ash said, sliding into a chair next to her. “You’re sitting with a true soup hero, you know that?” Kaidan shook his head and stared into his mug.

“I heard a little about it, Gunnery Chief Williams. I am sorry that I missed the spectacle, but I have not felt myself equal to much socializing, recently,” Liara said softly, also looking into her mug.

“How are you doing?” Ash asked.

“I was just telling Lieutenant Alenko that some days are better than others. My mother and I did not share the best of relationships, but sometimes, the memories come when I least expect them,” she murmured.

“That probably won’t ever stop,” Ash said, as gently as she could. “Sometimes I can go for days, without thinking about my dad. And then something— an article on the Extranet, the smell of someone’s cologne, even just the way someone says a word. It hits again. All you can do is wait it out.”

“But does it get easier?” Liara asked.

“Yeah. It never stops hurting. But it gets… easier, to carry,” Ash said. “It just takes a long time. I could tell you to remember the good times, to carry her memory forward, all that. But honestly sometimes thinking about the good times hurts worse than thinking about the bad ones.”

Liara nodded. They sat quietly, the ever present hum of the Normandy a soundtrack to their thoughts.

“What did you two do, by the way?” Kaidan broke the silence, looking at Ash.

“Hm?”

“Earlier, when you asked to see Shepard in private. If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Ah,” Ash smiled. “That, LT, is a secret.”

***

Much later, after waves crashing along an endless coast, after lines held at bitter cost, after a voice murmuring _I don’t regret a thing_ was lost in a silent shockwave, after guilt began exacting its razor’s price, Shepard appeared in the mess, her hair sheared right below her ears, ends jagged as if she had taken a pair of blunt scissors and just chopped.

Everyone looked up.

Her eyes tracked to the one empty chair, between Liara and Kaidan.

“Are you hungry, Commander?” Liara asked, breaking the silence.

Shepard stood, bruises under her bloodshot eyes.

“No,” she said, and left the mess the way she had come.

She never explained, why she cut it. When it was too short to even pull back in a ponytail. When it fell into her eyes as she tried to aim. When she’d shake her head, bobby pins falling out before she muttered _She didn’t die for this bullshit_. When it began to grow out, so that by the time the Reapers burned like comets over Vancouver, she wore it in a long braid, and only a braid, all the time. And no one asked her, at the end. No one needed to, even though Ash had kept her word till the end.


	5. In which Shepard chooses synthesis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In my canon playthrough, I chose synthesis because I couldn't stomach killing EDI or the geth. When I think about my Shepard, I think she chooses it because she's just so Tired and very Done. Uh, and I guess this is a bit about her backstory, and what her life on Mindoir was like before the batarians.

The land that her parents farmed was near the coast and below sea level— the water came, and it came. Flooding was part of life like falling ill or crop rot or drowning, before the dykes were completed. The air was wet, and it would rain for months, and the water would come, and come. They built the houses high, and they grew rice, and water chestnuts, and cranberries. When the dykes were completed, and the water pumped from the soil, they would have more choice in the things they pulled from the ground, but Shepard never wanted to be there long enough to see it.

When she was very young, the world sounded like water—rain against the window, her booted feet squelching in the mud, waves sucking at the side of her small boat as she drifted, staring up into the gunmetal grey sky. She liked to take her boat out into the cranberry bogs, and look at the grey water, the grey sky, and the cranberries splashed over the water like a cut throat, the only color for hectares.

She would drift, fingers trailing the water over the boat’s side. She thought about when she could finally leave. She thought about dry deserts and dry starships. She thought about universities for her brother.

He was so small, much too small for his age. She wondered if it was the diet, if there was something wrong with the food her family had brought with them to settle Mindoir. He was small, but he was clever—more clever than she ever hoped to be. She was going to leave, but she wasn’t going to leave him behind. Her parents hadn’t given them a choice when they decided to be colonists and dragged their children across the galaxy to a plot of drowning ground. But she would steal back the choice she should have had, and she would steal one for her brother too.

The years went by, and the sound of water was replaced by the sound of thumping—the dykes had been completed, and giant pumps were built to pull the water from the ground. The thumping shook the water, its surface rippling with each thrust. The pumps echoed between the buildings as she passed time in the nearby settlement, drinking or dusting. The sound was like a second heartbeat. From dusk until dawn, the pumps worked, and she could no longer hear her own heart; she thought maybe hers had been replaced by the pumps of Mindoir, and if she tried to leave, her heart wouldn’t remember how to work anymore and would fail once she finally made it to the silent stars.

When she was fourteen, she no longer drifted on the water. She worked construction, pissing off her parents because she refused to help with the farm, and she saved credits, and she waited. She waited as her credits built up, and she waited for both her and her brother to reach the age of majority. He remained on the farm, dutifully following vidscreened school lectures and helping with the harvests. She went where the work was, and she crashed with friends or lovers, other hollow-cheeked kids with a bottle in one hand and a ticket to nowhere in the other.

When she did return home every few weeks to see her brother, she was always sober. She didn’t want him to see her sloppy or dusted up. She wanted him to trust her. She wanted him to come with her. She believed she could stand being sober all the time once they were away from the water, and he was laughing, light-hearted, in a place with more colors than water had to offer. Since she didn’t seem to have the capacity to laugh, as long as he was laughing, she would make sure he could laugh for the both of them, and that would be enough.

When she would return home, he would demand that she make him a snack, because he was a clever little brat, and he knew that she liked to watch him eat, that her grumbling was all for show. He would lean into her side, and she would ask him what he was learning about in school, and most of it she didn’t understand, but he’d talk and talk and talk, and she’d run her hands through his hair and listen.

It has been years, since she heard the pumps. Now, in the dark, the thumping is deafening. The slow one-two beat pounds inside her head and everything hurts. A weight on her shoulder makes wounds there ache, but she can’t figure out what it is. She needs to open her eyes. She needs to get up. She’s trying to remember why. She’s trying to remember how she got back to Mindoir, she’s trying to remember the last thing her brother said to her. She can see his lips moving, an image inside her head, the bottom lip fuller than the top, his crooked teeth flashing in a smile, but she can’t remember what he was saying last.

The thumping goes on and on, until she finally opens her eyes.

 _Oh_.

She begins to laugh.

It hurts. Everything hurts. It has always hurt to laugh, once she laughed, truly laughed for the first time standing outside of her parents’ burning house, but this time it physically hurts. Something is broken inside her.

She risks her head hurting more, and glances down at the weight on her shoulder.

She doesn’t know how long it has been since Anderson died. She remembers his head falling heavily on her shoulder and his slow breathing growing slower, but she doesn’t know how long she has been unconscious. She wonders if she passed out for too long, if it’s all over. She wonders if she has already failed, if the entire Earth is on fire now, not just London, just like her parents’ house on Mindoir, fire a new color licking the grey. She looks around the Citadel, and she sees the grey metal of the floor, and the red blood pooling out from her and Anderson, and she is irritated that she will die drenched in the same colors as her youth.

The irritation stokes her petty side, and she decides to get up and keep going, even if it’s too late. Maybe she can shoot something before she bleeds out entirely. She doesn’t think she has the hand strength to choke anything.

She gently cradles Anderson’s head and eases herself from beneath him, and she lays him slowly down in their red blood, and she kisses his forehead as the thumping continues in her blown-out ears, as she realizes it’s her own heart, the meat of it still pumping— she thinks vaguely that she was wrong, that Mindoir’s water pumps hadn’t ruined her heart, that she had been functioning fine without them for years and years but maybe had never really figured that out.

For some reason she thinks of Kaidan.

Her bloody nose has left a smear on Anderson’s forehead, so she looks around for anything to wipe it off with but there’s nothing. Everything is burnt and filthy. She traces a heart into it with her forefinger instead, because she wants him to know that she loved him like the dad her dad should have been and she had never told him that.

She leaves him there and every step away hurts, but she has always known her own limitations, even if she has rarely bothered to respect them, and she knows that she can’t carry him right now.

She has to stop every few minutes as black edges out her sight, as her leg drags, as the thumping grows louder and she begins to hallucinate that she never left Mindoir, that everything since the batarians came has been a dream, and that she has in fact died with her brother like she has wanted all these years, and this is the last flicker of her brain’s already faulty synapses slowly dying.

She opens her eyes again and she has somehow reached wherever she had thought she needed to go; she is at the heart of the Citadel, and her brother is standing in front her, no hint of mischief in the set of his serious mouth.

He looks like he looked when they were children, when he would drift in her little boat with her, as he would rest his head on his arm along the side and watch the cranberries bob in the water.

She can’t hear what he’s saying—all she can see are his lips moving, and now she wants to cry because once again she can’t hear what’s so important, and he’s right there but she doesn’t have the strength to go to him but she wants to hug him.

She closes her eyes.

She opens her eyes.

It’s not her brother. It’s the child from Vancouver. The one she watched die in fire, like the fire on Mindoir, the child like her brother when he was young on Mindoir.

Now she laughs again, but the laughing turns into a cough which then turns into choking and she spits red blood onto the floor at her feet.

She doesn’t know how she finally realizes that she is being offered a choice, that she is not too late, that what she and the rest of the galaxy had believed might not be true, that she has to make a decision, again, that will affect every single person in the whole fucking galaxy, and she gurgles a little and spits again and feels so tired.

She wonders what Kaidan would say, if he were here, his big hand at her back, his breath on her neck. What would Kaidan do? He is her moral compass when hers has been broken for as long as she can remember. He is the only reason her body count isn’t any higher; since meeting him, she has stopped to consider whether Kaidan would approve or be disappointed. Half the time it doesn’t stop her because she’s an asshole and she knows that, but his opinion does make her think twice. Not that she has ever told him that. God, she is an asshole.

The child is looking at her expectantly. The thumping in her ears hurts. She thinks of the other people she loves or has loved in her life, and wonders what they would do. She knows what Miranda would do. She knows what Ash would do. She knows what Legion would have wanted, and she knows what Joker would want. She’s not so sure about Garrus, or Jack, or Mordin, her reckless and calculating friends, soulmates in regret and anger and sorrow.

She knows that she is tired. She knows that she doesn’t want the cycle to continue, that she hasn’t worked this hard and stayed alive this long just so that the endless loop would repeat again, the geth and the quarians, the protheans and the reapers, AI against organic, Jenkins’s pathetic funeral, the sound of Ash’s voice over the comms, Mordin singing to himself, Legion tentatively wrapping the arm around her that bore her N7 armor that he had never explained. She thinks of EDI, with her sly jokes and worrying about a gift for Joker.

She knows what Kaidan went through, the first time he thought she was gone forever. She had told him that there were no promises, and that there was nothing keeping it from happening again. She had urged him to return to the person who had loved him while she was dead, but he had shaken his head. He had pressed his palm to her back, between her shoulder blades, and drawn her into his chest, and made his decision. And he has stood behind her through all of her shitty decisions, even when he thought she was trying to murder the Council. She blanks out for a minute as she thinks again how much she would have liked to murder the Council but still feeling slightly offended that he actually believed that she would do it. He has stood right behind her, every limping step. She wants to give him a chance; she wants his children— she wants whatever or whoever Kaidan ultimately leaves behind to never have to deal with what they have had to deal with, and she wants Joker to have the stabilizing gravity that Kaidan has given her, and she wants Legion’s sacrifice to matter, and she wants to laugh, one last time, without it hurting, because she knows that for once in her shitty life she has done the right thing, and doubly so since she knows that it’s going to piss a  _lot_ of people off. But fuck  _them_ , no one ever asked her what she wanted, whether she actually wanted to save the fucking galaxy. They can file a complaint with whatever government is formed after this mess is over, because she will not be taking customer feedback after this shit-show. She will not be coming back here ever again.

And that's what her life has been: resistance to the strange pattern of people returning to the place where they began. There were people she had heard about, the ones who finally got away from Mindoir and were never seen again. To her, as a teenager drifting along the water, or waking up in someone else's bed, those few who never came back again were the heroes. She imagined them drinking silken cocktails from slender-stemmed glasses, held in hands no longer calloused by the work in the field, by heavy construction. She imagined those hands for her brother. The few rockets launched successfully into orbit, when so many others inevitably made their fiery re-entry, broken pieces of their shattered plans drifting back into the waters of Mindoir like the rest of the rain.

She had told herself that wouldn't be like them. Her brother wouldn't be like them. They'd launch themselves into the glittering dark and neither of them would ever fall back down.

She remembers those feelings now. She traces her own trajectory through the stars; she had fallen over different skies, and her brother had never even gotten off the ground.

The laugh grating her throat hurts her, like everything else.

Time dilates. Relativity favors her, for once; she has just enough time, before the end of all things, to remember the things that matter. The things she did. The things she saw. The colors that had bled into her, as if she had slit her wrists backwards as she was leaving Mindoir's atmosphere, and she had been filled instead of spilling through all the hours days months and years that followed.

She thinks about Noveria, the blue white of it, Kaidan's warm hands resting on her cold cheeks, Ash waving flares through the snowfall, Garrus looking dubiously through the Rachni queen's glass prison and asking Shepard if this was actually a good idea, as Wrex frowned at his own reflection in the glass. She thinks of how she had rested her hands on Liara's shoulders, and Liara had leaned into her before Shepard could back away, and suddenly she was holding her in her arms as she wept for her dead mother, yet another kill on Shepard's endless list. Shepard had thought about her brother, briefly, as she made soft sounds underneath Liara's stuttering sobs. Liara had eventually fallen asleep with her face in Shepard's neck, and Shepard had carried her to her bunk and sat with her in the dark, had watched Liara wrap her arms around herself as she slept. She remembered holding herself like that, and the desolation of survival spreading out behind her like the blood soaking the already damp earth under her brother's body. More red staining the grey. Guilt suddenly fills her mouth, a feeling she always tries to chew and swallow without tasting, as she thinks of everyone she will leave behind, as she herself has been left behind over and over again. Dying seems like the easy part to her— it is the surviving that hurts, and hurts, and hurts.

She thinks about Virmire, another planet with too much water, and remembers the pastel sky, the wrong softness of the colors against the blunt lines of the research facility, the blinding flash of a nuke through the shuttle windows. More colors tattooed under her skin.

She thinks about the quarian fleet, with all its green sheltered under metal, the plants misted gently every hour. She smiles at the memory of Legion's hand over her own hand at the small of Tali's trembling back, as they stood in a sea of masked faces, as they argued her case before the tribunal.

Shepard realizes that she has never had enough time to mourn any of them. That her life has been the arc of a cannon shell punching through walls, each smoking crater already behind her before she has time to think, too far away for her to reach back and grasp, to settle— to  _feel_ without the pull forward, ever forward, into the next obstacle that will hurt as she smashes through it. She has felt each and every impact, and each victory has been bought with the pieces broken from her on each hit. Bits of Shepard, a strange sort of currency.

In some of her nightmares, she is humming with Mordin; they are standing side by side, and she sighs with relief as the tower finally begins to fall.

She thinks about Vancouver, another grey place, with too much rain falling from the sky, but the monochrome is pierced by the red of apples, not cranberries, and the blue of Kaidan's migraines, the flash of a white heron's wings, the golden brown of Kaidan's skin in a streetlamp's pooled light, the black hair trailing down his stomach which Shepard would follow with her mouth, a flightmap bearing her favorite coordinates.

In other nightmares, she is waiting for Thane on the shore of an endless ocean, but he never comes walking down the beach. It is only her, and the grey water meeting the grey sky, and the rain blurring the edges.

Shepard thinks of the pink skies of Thessia, and the heavy green of Ilos; she thinks of the cream sands of Tuchanka, the nuclear yellow of its sickly sky; she thinks of Tali removing her mask in a purple twilight, and how badly Shepard wanted to run her fingers over Tali's skin, but she couldn't quite bring herself to do it, even if Tali had already told her that she was family, that she'd link suits if Shepard asked. Even as their world was falling apart, Shepard couldn't say all the things that mattered to the people who mattered. She hopes now that this final gesture will carry the transmission for her, with each breath they take for the rest of their lives:  _thank you, for making all the days after Mindoir bearable; the grumbling was all for show._

For many years, when Shepard thought about herself in the quiet of her own mind, she pictured her back, and her hands hanging at her sides. In all the promo holos, she is saluting, or looking down the scope of her rifle, or raising her fists high. But in her own mind, she stood, still as a docked ship, her hands hanging uselessly at her sides, facing away from her own gaze.

Her last picture of herself will be a leap; a graceful arc of a body eagerly slicing through space, her arms thrown up and palms open, receptive, her long legs weightless and sure, as she makes the right decision, as she finally gets to  _finish_ it.

_You are running out of time._

The little shit is staring at her still, and she knows he— it— whatever it is, is right. Here she is, at the end of everything.

She limps forward.

She thinks of her brother.

She thinks of Kaidan.

Her heart's pump is cannon fire in her deaf ears.

In the end, she’s laughing because she’s dying in green instead of grey and red or the fires of Mindoir, and it still hurts, but for once the pain doesn’t last long.


End file.
